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The journey to a full night's sleep

Month: November 2014

Fighting my urge to go online for the past 2 weeks as part of my insomnia therapy proved to be harder than expected. It’s amazing how addicted we are to all these electronics and cannot help ourselves to keep staring at them all day long. Since EVERY electronic device is connected to the internet nowadays (luckily, the microwave oven managed to escape this evil takeover) I found myself reading books and talking to people – definitely not my favorite things to do, but as you can see I’ve been successful so far!

I haven’t had a minute to spare at work and therefore there weren’t any posts in the past 2+ weeks. But here I am, making some time just to rant some more about life in general and my somewhat-improved sleep problems in particular. I never would’ve thought I’d become a blogger, but I think it’s growing on me.

Back to basics

For those of you who don’t know what CBT is and are too lazy to use Google to figure out what it stands for, I’ll say it’s a way to train yourself to behave just as nature intended. No, it doesn’t mean we should all start walking naked, turn into farmers and only eat organic food. Going back to basics means getting a routine going where you educate and train your body to behave in a positive way – in my case, fall to sleep and stay asleep.

In my case, I try to keep exercising whenever I can (once a week – I’m a very busy guy) and avoid any entertainment devices approximately 2 hours before my intended bed time. Then, when I go to bed, I try to get the room as dark as possible and just lay silently, trying to replace my worries with happy and positive thoughts. It took some time before any sign of success appeared, but I can finally say that I do manage to fall asleep quite regulary!

Problem is that I’m still stuck with waking up in the middle of the night, 2-3 hours after I fall asleep. I still haven’t been able to solve this issue, but I finally feel I’m on the right track. Some friends offered that I should start using herbal remedies. Generally I don’t believe these things ever work, but as long as there’s no doctor involved then I am willing to try. I’ve heard about Valerian quite a few times in the past, and it was repeated a couple more times now, so maybe that’s what I should start with.

(This has been the most optimistic post so far, don’t expect this to happen again.)